As a business owner you may have heard quite a bit about Artificial Intelligence and its benefits for business. However, you may not be aware that adding tools based on integrated machine learning, deep learning algorithms and other products is not as difficult as it sounds. Indeed, you may not even be aware that some of these are examples of AI.
Chatbots and virtual assistants
Have you visited a services website recently and had a box pop up offering to have a chat with you? Chatbots and virtual assistants are appearing on more and more websites. It isn’t difficult to find a chatbot service for you business and you can get a writer to provide you with a bespoke script that suits the tone and style of the rest of your website.
Online courses
It doesn’t have to cost you anything to get taught by the best. For example, Udacity offers a free Intro to AI course. Stanford University has a AI: Principles and Techniques course, and there are many others, including a Microsoft’s Cognitive Toolkit and MonkeyLearn’s ‘Gentle Guide to Machine Learning’.
Know what you want to do with AI
Once you’ve learnt the AI basics, it’s time to establish how AI can help your business. Think about how you can add AI capabilities to your existing products and services and look for ways n which AI can solve problems and add value.
Bring in the experts
Once you’ve identified some goals in your business where AI provides a valuable solution, it is probably time to organise consultations with AI experts. Setting up a pilot project that can be evaluated over a two to three months period, is one way to do it and bring in consultants to work with a small internal team. Once the pilot has been completed, you’ll be able to decide whether or not to take it forward for the long term.
Integrate AI in daily work routines
Once you have AI on board, make sure all workers have a tool to make AI part of their daily routine, rather than something that replaces it. AI scares some employees who feel threatened by it in the sense it might replace them, so it’s important to demonstrate that it is a help to them instead.
AI can really improve your chances of success and help teams to work more efficiently — so it’s time to get on board with the bots in business.